If you don’t follow international economic news (Spoiler Alert: I don’t as much as I should) then you probably haven’t heard of the Astana Economic Forum (Spoiler Alert: I hadn’t), a conference of economists and other world leaders that takes place in Kazakhstan. (Yes. Kazakhstan. Color me bashful.)

The Forum has been compared to the economic gatherings in Davos in terms of importance, and attracts Noble Prize winner and former heads of state such as Tony Blair. [For more background see this PR piece.]

To be perfectly honest I learned all this today because I happen to follow futurist Jamais Cascio on Twitter, and I woke up to a disturbing series of tweets from Cascio emanating from this rising nation that borders both Russia and China. Storify user Eric Calkins pulled together this collection of Cascio’s tweets from this morning.

There’s a rapturous term thrown around by VR enthusiasts: “The Metaverse.” It is a term that comes from the seminal Neal Stephenson science fiction novel Snow Crash, where it described a kind of embodied virtual reality.